


The Sparseness and the Sentiment

by Margo_Kim



Category: The Avengers (2012)
Genre: Canonical Character Death, Character Study, Female Protagonist, Friendship, Gen, Grief/Mourning, Male-Female Friendship, POV Female Character
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-08-17
Updated: 2012-08-17
Packaged: 2017-11-12 07:45:03
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,497
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/488414
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Margo_Kim/pseuds/Margo_Kim
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"Maria Hill slept five hours a night. Never more. Occasionally less. That was her optimal amount of sleep, enough to refresh her and no more. Maria had not reached her position by courting inefficiency." Maria Hill's relationships before and after the film.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Sparseness and the Sentiment

Maria Hill slept five hours a night. Never more. Occasionally less. That was her optimal amount of sleep, enough to refresh her and no more. Maria had not reached her position by courting inefficiency.

“That’s terrible. That’s absolutely terrible,” her sister clucked over the phone when Maria made the mistake of bringing it up. Maria rolled her eyes, but she stayed quiet. She knew better than to argue with her sister when she was on her health rants. “I’m serious, Maria,” Emma said. “I read an article in Time that says most people need at least eight hours to properly function.”

“I’m not most people,” Maria said. She sheathed the knife she’d been sharpening and moved on to her pistol. She always used her calls to Emma to clean her weapons. What was she supposed to do, just sit there?

Emma sighed. “I’m emailing you that article. Seriously, Maria, _seriously_ , not sleeping enough can kill you. _Kill_ you.”

Maria triple-checked that her Glock was unloaded before she field striped it. “Laziness would kill me faster.”

Someone rapped on the door to her quarters, three quick knocks. Maria knew that beat. “It’s open,” she said and Phil stuck his head in.

“Is this a bad time?” he asked.

“Who’s that?” Emma said. “Is that Phil? Tell him I say hi.”

“It’s fine,” Maria told Phil. “Emma says hi.”

Phil waved at the phone. “Hi, Emma.”

“He says hi,” Maria told Emma. “What’s up?” she asked Phil.

He held up a file folder. “Secret stuff. Moderately urgent.”

“I’m gonna have to let you go,” Maria said to Emma.

“I figured,” Emma replied. “Tell Phil thank you for the Christmas card. And tell him to tell you to get you more sleep! Do you have his email? I can CC him that article.”

“Goodbye, Emma,” Maria said firmly and hung up before her sister could get another word in. “You sent her a Christmas card?”

 “She was so nice at the holiday party last year.” He gestured at her dismantled gun with his folder. “Can you go to the bridge now?”

In a blink, her gun was reassembled and tucked in her hostler. Maria stood and tugged the wrinkles out of her uniform. “Let’s go.” They walked out of her room and down the quiet corridor of the officer’s wing at a quick clip, Phil just at her heels. “Is about the Tesseract? I haven’t heard anything from Dr. Selvig since Thursday.”

“The situation is still unchanged, though he says that the Phase Two blueprints look sound for the go-ahead when he manages to harness the Cube,” Phil said. “We did reassign Miss Lewis to intern at Human Resources and that seems to have speed up the doctor’s progress. I don’t think her rampant attempts to hit on Barton were speeding anything up. Especially not when Barton seemed so receptive.” Outside the door to the bridge, Phil stopped Maria with a gentle hand on her arm. When she raised her eyebrow questioningly, he passed over the file folder. “The information for your next assignment is in here.”

She took it. It felt very light. “Very old school,” she said and flipped it open. On the inside, there was just one piece of paper: a sheet of S.H.I.E.L.D.  official memo paper on which someone had written in neat, precise letters, “HAPPY BIRTHDAY!!” It looked like it had been written in ballpoint pen. Someone had also doodled a few stars in highlighter. Maria stared at it for a moment before she looked up and stared at Phil instead.  

He shrugged sheepishly. “I’m not very good at cards.” He pressed the button that opened the door, and what sounded like a hundred voices shouted at her. It was only when her pistol was in her hands and she had started to move for cover that she realized they what they were shouting.

The bridge was festooned. There were streamers. There were balloons. Director Fury had a party hat on. This was all very much against regulation.

“But my birthday’s next month,” Maria said finally.

Phil put his hand on her back and pushed her into the room. “We know. We thought this was the only way a surprise party could surprise you. There’s cake. Please don’t shoot anyone.”

Captain Dolnick, the only secret agent Maria had ever met who was also a compulsive scrapbooker, had snapped a picture of Maria and Phil as the door opened. In it, Maria’s jaw is dropped, her eyes wide. The file folder drops to the floor as she reached for the gun on her belt. Besides her, Coulson smiles beneficently at Maria, his hands clasped behind him. Half the personnel on the Helicarrier made it their computer background for the next few weeks, and two days after her very surprising surprise party, Maria found the picture on her bed, now in a very nice silver frame. The note stuck to the back, written in those neat, precise letters, read “Photographic proof that the unflappable Maria Hill can be flapped.”

Maria moved to throw the picture, note and all, away, but somehow it ended up on the shelf by her bed instead. Every time she saw it, Maria thought, “I should get rid of that,” but on the shelf it stayed, the only object in her room not officially issued by S.H.I.E.L.D. . She kept a spartan existence, a sparseness of life that suited her even as its intensity horrified others. Maria simply did not need that many things and had never taken pleasure in possessing them. Her room was small and dark and bare. She didn’t like it, and she didn’t need to. Her sleeping quarters weren’t something to be liked or disliked. They were an end to a mean, a place where she took care of the time-consuming necessities of being alive, and not much else.

Phil raised his eyebrow when she told him that. “Not everything is about utility, Hill.”

She grinned at him, a wolfish look the new recruits learned to fear. “Sentiment doesn’t keep this ship in the air. Between you and Commander Fury, someone needs to be the bitch. Besides, you know I’m not one for knick knacks.”

Phil didn’t respond right away. She appreciated that about him. Unlike most people, he didn’t fear silence.  He thought until he had something worth saying and then he waited for the right moment to say it. “Still,” Phil replied at last, as mildly as he said most things, “you kept the picture.”

She didn’t have a response to that and Phil was smugly quiet for the rest of their walk. They always walked while they talked, the familiar habit of the habitually busy, for they always had somewhere they needed to be. There wasn’t enough time in their world for lingering. She’d beaten the inclination out of her system. Phil, on the other hand, was more indolent, more indulgent, and he thought she should be as well. He had talked her into a vacation once, a year before the Asgardians crashed their way into the world and exponentially increased the difficulty of Maria’s life. He had filled out the paperwork for her and everything. All she needed to do was sign. “Recharge,” he had said. “One week away from here won’t kill you.” So for one week she stayed away from S.H.I.E.L.D. , shut down her communicator, turned off the news, hiked up a mountain just to see what was at the top, and pitched a tent up there. During the day she climbed and hiked and foraged. During the night she read a romance she’d bought at the airport until she fell asleep. In the morning she woke and did it again.

It was hell. Worse, a particularly slow-moving hell. She speak the week envisioning every disaster that was happening onboard the ship, every intelligence breach, every enemy engagement, every tragedy that could be and would be her fault for not being there to stop it. She returned to work bronzer and surlier than when she left, tormented by nightmares of terrorists, spies, and bureaucratic inefficiency. When she discovered that nothing of note had happened in her absence, she was almost disappointed. Fury, damn that man, had chuckled at her. “S.H.I.E.L.D.  got by without you for five decades. It can last another week.”

Two days later, a terrorist startup calling itself AIM and armed with weapons ten years beyond the industry standard hijacked a British merchant ship en route to Cairo. Maria personally led the responding task force. In six hours, the ship was back in port, the civilians involved believed the attack was perpetuated by a local extremist group, and the hijackers were in the Helicarrier’s brand new prison cells awaiting her personal attention.

S.H.I.E.L.D.  could survive without her being there, but it did a hell of a lot better when she was.

So when Emma asked, in that chiding voice mimicked their mother so well Maria had to shiver, “How long has it been since your last vacation?” Maria was pleased that she could answer perfectly honestly for once.

“I went on a vacation just last year.”

“And you didn’t visit?” Emma said immediately, like Maria knew she would. “Julie doesn’t even know what her aunt looks like. You should come over next month, it’s her fourth birthday party.”

On the video monitors, Maria watched the engineers test the braces on the Hulk cage. The boys looked like they were having fun. She kept an eye on their level of enjoyment. It was never good when engineers entrusted with top secret tech started to feel playful. “I can’t right now. Work is crazy.”

Her sister sighed over the phone, a crackling rush of disappointment through the speakers. “Your work is always crazy. I know, I know, you can’t tell me what it is, but honestly, Maria, and I’m being serious, you’ll work yourself to death.”

An engineer mimed being electrocuted by one of the wires she was handling. Phil snapped at her before Maria could. “I can’t,” she told her sister distractedly as she watched Phil chastise the young techs, ready to step in if he needed any help. It looked like he was doing fine, though. In his own mild-mannered way, Phil could put the fear of God into men. “I’m busy.”

 “You’re always busy,” Emma said, her words sharp and cold. The bitterness caught Maria off-guard and knocked her into silence. 

“I am,” Maria said finally. “And that is never going to change.” The sisters let the silence stretch. On the monitor, Maria saw Phil wave at the security camera. _Come down_ , he was saying. _We need you_. “I have to go.”

“Fine” was all Emma said, or maybe she had said more. Maria wouldn’t know. She hung up mid-word.

They finished the cage just in time. Not that it did any good. They never even had a chance to use it on is intended target. Not that it would have held him. S.H.I.E.L.D.  had underestimated the Hulk’s capabilities. S.H.I.E.L.D.  had underestimated a lot of things. The only thing they’d overestimated was their own usefulness because when it mattered, when they were supposed to step up, the world was saved by six misfits with superpowers while the intrepid crew of the Helicarrier counted their dead.

 Dead. After so many years of saying it, the word still stuck in her throat. Dead. Fallen in the line of duty. A sacrifice for the greater good. A soldier fallen in the name of the war. If Maria had died in the line of duty, like so many other soldiers that day, like so many frightened civilians who didn’t understand why the sky was falling, she would have gotten a neat little obituary that said nothing of her life. This was the beast of secret operations: If her job was done properly, no one would know that she had done it. No one besides a few equally tight-lipped coworkers looking forward to equally bland eulogies. She would receive no credit, no praise, no medals. No neatly folded flag and bugle. Every mark she’d made on the Earth would go unclaimed. For people like her, success wasn’t measured in lives saved but lives that were never in danger, in the number of people who could still walk around utterly ignorant of the danger that they lived in every day, every minute, ever second.

She had not been very successful recently.

“Hello?” Emma said on the other side of the phone. “Hello? Is anyone there? Maria, is that you? Are you alright? Were you in New York? Maria? Maria?”

Maria hung up.

It was a balmy day in the suburbs of Portland. The blue sky of early summer tinted the neighborhood a happy color. Through her car’s open windows as she drove, Maria heard the sounds of children shrieking and running, running and shrieking, as they chased each other through their lawns. They were her niece’s and nephew’s ages—or were they older? Younger? How long ago had Emma married Frank? Maria had been serving in Afghanistan then, that much she knew because she missed the wedding in favor of supervising the extraction of the Black Widow asset from her hiding place in Herat. “She’s dangerous,” she had told Phil, Agent Coulson to her back then. He favored navy back then, a navy suit and a red pocket square, an affectation he dropped when Maria pointed out how memorable it made him look.

“Barton trusts her,” he had said simply.

“Barton’s dangerous too.”

Phil had never listened to reason about either of them. He had too much idealism for the man he was supposed to be. In his quiet way, he overflowed with hope, and Maria could never understand that. He had joined S.H.I.E.L.D.  to keep good people safe; she, to stop bad people from winning. The difference was a chasm, Maria on one side and Phil on the other.

Maria parked in front of 2448 Maple Avenue, a small white house with a neatly trimmed lawn and a small garden. Through the window, a small Golden Lab ecstatically barked at her. “Sorry about her,” the woman who answered the door said by way of greeting as she held the door open with one hand and held her dog back with the other. “Hello, can I help you?”

“Tammy Lin?” Maria asked. The woman nodded and smiled a wide, honest grin. “I’m Maria Wallis. I’m Phil Coulson’s cousin. Can I talk to you inside?”

The dog lunged at Maria’s knees with wet, slobbering affection before Tammy yanked her back. “Calm down, Cap!” She gave Maria an apologetic smile. “Maybe we should talk outside.” Pushing the puppy back with her foot and closing the door, she said, “I’m trying to train her, but I don’t have the discipline for it. Anytime she looks at me with her big old puppy eyes, I give her whatever she wants.” The door shut, she turned around, crossed her arms, and rocked back on her heels. “Sorry about that. Did you say you know Phil?”

“His cousin.” Maria looked away from Tammy’s bright, clear eyes.  A swift stab, a slit throat—the quickest death was the kindest. “He was in New York City last Tuesday on business when the city was attacked. He didn’t make it.”

There was silence, save for the dog whining, save for the children playing, save for the sounds of life swirling on. “What?” Tammy asked, like Maria had misspoke, like if she asked for clarification, she’d get a different answer. “What? I don’t understand. I don’t—he said he was going to Cleveland that week. On business. He called me and said that he was going to Cleveland on business. We talked last Monday. He asked about my concert. He was in Cleveland not New York.”

“His business called him to New York.”

Tammy’s arms tightened around herself until she wasn’t crossing her arms but hugging herself, one hand pressed against her mouth. Her eyes were wide and wet, but no tear had fallen yet. “I don’t understand,” she said and blinked and now the tears were here. “I don’t understand. We talked last Monday. He said that he was planning to visit soon.”

“I didn’t know how serious you two were,” Maria said quietly. “But I thought you should know.”

“We’d broken up, but it wasn’t supposed to be forever.” Her voice choked with the effort to force words through sobs. “I said I couldn’t do long-distance right now and he said that he understood. He helped me pick out Cap at the shelter to keep me company here. He helped me name him.” Her eyes went wide and she grabbed at Maria’s arm like a drowning woman grasping in the water. “Oh God, did he get to see Captain America? If he was in New York, he definitely saw Captain America. Right? Did he?”

Maria couldn’t see. The world blurred. She needed to speak, she had to, she had a question to answer, but the words wouldn’t come out so Maria just nodded, nodded so fiercely she thought her neck would snap. She couldn’t stop nodding her head for some reason which was silly, it was ridiculous, it was _her body_ , and she would stop this right now so she took a deep shuddering breath.

 Now Tammy wasn’t grabbing Maria’s arm, she was rubbing it. “Maria?”

“He would have been so proud,” Maria said. She couldn’t look at Tammy, she couldn’t look at anything because the colors of the world were running together. “He believed in them and he would have been so proud and happy, and he’s not, he’s just _dead_.” Her voice cracked on the last word and she hated herself for it, but now Tammy was pulling her close so that Maria’s head was buried in Tammy’s shoulder and Maria clutched at her and sobbed and sobbed and sobbed until it sounded like laughter.

In the car, Maria checked herself in the mirror. She wiped away the tears. She fixed her makeup. She pinned her hair back into place and thought about the aid money allocation meeting she had tomorrow morning. By the time she was done, she looked like herself again. Imperturbable. Composed. Unflappable.

“Did you know that the kids in Bio Tech have a bet going on whether anyone can make you smile?” Phil had told her over lunch one day. It had been a summer day, and the mess hall was serving chicken wings, and Phil had brought Maria her coffee just the way she liked it. “The leading bet is that you’re a Life Decoy Model who’s been upgraded beyond such petty things as human emotions.”

“Hmm.” Maria chewed her wing thoughtfully. “That’s deeply flattering.”

“I thought that would make you happy,” Phil said. “Although, if you agree to laugh at a knock knock joke I’m about to tell you, I’ll split the pot with you fifty-fifty.”

His grave was small and bare and unremarkable. A name and two dates. She left no flowers at the newly dug grave. Offering sentiment to a slab of granite wouldn’t have made Maria feel better, and where he was, he didn’t need them. When she turned from the gravesite, her face was dry and Fury was there, a bouquet of roses in one hand, a black tablet in the other. He handed the latter to her. She turned it on and read, _CLASSIFIED S.H.I.E.L.D. MATERIALS—THE AVENGERS INITIATIVE_.

“It’s your project now,” Director Fury said. “If you want it.”

A glorified circus performer and a defector assassin. A Mr. Hyde and a Playboy. A man from the wrong time and a man from the wrong world. They frightened her, they truly did, these broken people with more power than they should have and less control than they needed. “They’re a disaster waiting to happened,” she’d said the first time she saw the lineup, and Phil, loyal and smart and fatally idealistic, had smiled that mild smile.

“No, Maria. They’re heroes.”

“I’ll do it,” she said.

Maria slept five hours a night. No more. Occasionally less. Sometimes not at all. Heroes, she was sure, slept well at night, but she found it easier to stay up. She had her work, an ever-growing pile that never got smaller, where failure was measured in bodies and success was met with silence. There was more to do now than ever before, and there were fewer people to do it. The battered, tattered barely flying Helicarrier was too empty these days, and the recruits that came to fill the gaps were children.

“It’s hard to believe that we were that young once,” she said.

No one responded. No one was there.


End file.
